You skip cleaning the kitchen one week and look what happens!: Paramount/Raimi Productions

This was pretty gnarly, as the kids used to say (probably). We’ve seen so many varied creature features from the paranoid 1950s to the invention of the blockbuster in the 1970s and the low-fi efforts of the 2000s. CRAWL is of a piece with a lot of these but seems to get a lot more of the basics right that so many bafflingly get wrong.

Championship swimmer Haley (Kaya Scodelario) braves a ferocious hurricane to rescue her dad (Barry Pepper) who has become trapped in the crawlspace under his house as it floods and fills with alligators.

You can visualise the pitch meeting for Crawl pretty easily. “Hey! I’ve got a great idea for a movie! What if you were trapped in a basement? Right, but what’s a lot worse than being trapped in a basement? Being trapped in a basement that’s flooding! What’s a lot worse than being trapped in a basement that’s flooding? Being trapped in a basement that’s flooding and there’s alligators! And not just one or two alligators but loads of them! I know, right? Mind blown!”.

It really doesn’t matter what shape of animal is chasing you in movies like this, the pertinent question is do you care if it catches our protagonists? A good old-fashioned strained father-daughter relationship works well enough, giving Haley and her dad ample time between saving their limbs to talk through their myriad issues works wonders.

Haley and her dad really are put through it, battered, beaten and bitten by the natural world until one of them is more tourniquet than person. Objectives and consequences of each stage of the escape are clearly set out, action set pieces are well-paced, punctuated with jumps and a fair few surprises that blindside you and the alligators themselves which look like a combination of CGI and puppets/animatronics mostly convince. I say mostly because there’s always that split-second transition between something practical and something computer animated that really jars.

The film is a tight 85 minutes and not a moment is wasted. Yes, extra characters are introduced later on purely to give the scaly hunters more to chew on (oh I wonder what might happen to the occupants of an overladen, rickety boat or that guy leaning over a dark cellar hatch?) but our two leads only have so many limbs they can lose. Also having a very cute dog on hand for you to hope for survival is a cheap trick to keep audiences engaged but you expect that with this sort of territory.

Creature features are completely reliant on the animal antagonists being far more aggressive and relentless than they would be in reality. What alligator wouldn’t give up after being stabbed in the eye? You also just have to check your brain and go with the rules of this world – don’t question blood loss rates or the fact that an alligator could out swim any human no matter how long they’ve spent in the pool. Yes, even if we’ve had an opening scene establishing just how much Haley has to prove, it doesn’t turn her into a mermaid at a convenient time.

Crawl doesn’t really break any new ground but it’s very good at what it does, and what it does is serve up a jumbo helping of tense thrills without outstaying its welcome. Pop it on next time you have friends around for beer and snacks, enjoy the laughs and gasps and watch food, beverages and furniture fly at the jumpy bits. SSP

You don’t tend to see chamber pieces about big men with guns, but that’s exactly what THE STANDOFF AT SPARROW CREEK is, which is pretty novel. Someone in this militia has opened fire at a cop’s funeral and everyone is baying for their blood. James Badge Dale is reliable as always, here a coiled spring acting as chief interrogator of such character actors as Chris Mulkey and Gene Jones and writer-director Henry Dunham gives the film a good murky look to match the deception at play. But it somehow manages to feel much longer than it actually is, the dialogue doesn’t have much crackle and the surprises, when they eventually come, aren’t all that surprising. You’d also be hard-pressed to nail down exactly what the film is saying about American gun culture, “both sides”-ing the debate. It’s a decent effort but nothing that you’ll remember come the morrow. SSP

The release of a new Quentin Tarantino film is an event. Even if it’s not his 9th. It’s really not his 9th – by my count it’s either 10th or 11th. You generally know what to expect from QT, so you’ve got to give the man credit that he’s doing something a bit different for much of ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD.

Former Hollywood heartthrob Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is past it, and his industry knows it. Stuck in a rut of demeaning TV villain guest star roles, Dalton is only kept a functioning human being by his stunt double-turned-gofer Cliff Booth, who himself has a possibly dark past and a go-nowhere career. The Swinging Sixties are drawing to a close, Hollywood is changing and opportunities are aplenty for rising stars like Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) who lives on Dalton’s street, but can he find a place for himself again or is he condemned to irrelevance?

The first half is pretty restrained as far as Tarantino films go. No violence, relatively little swearing, not even much showboating in the script. We just follow Rick and Cliff looking back at when they mattered and forward to the not-too-distant future when they most likely will not. We then progress to palpable menace and Acting for the second movement where some stuff actually happens before coming finally to an uncomfortable black comic horror finale.

Speaking of acting, yes it’s probably the best work from DiCaprio and Pitt for quite a while, the former throwing himself into full-on breakdown mode and the latter doing much of the heavy lifting with a more subtle performance (subtle, at least, when he’s not fighting Bruce Lee). Robbie as Sharon Tate dazzles when she’s on screen (sadly not all that often) and even gets to take pleasure in watching the woman she’s playing on a cinema screen at one point.

Once Upon a Time is focussed on a peculiar period in Hollywood and a very particular kind of star. While the maverick young filmmakers of New Hollywood rebelled and made their statements, some performers found themselves trapped in a demeaning cycle. Old Hollywood to New, TV to film, there were a lot of uncomfortable transitions.

The best scenes for me were a pair of intimate minor-key moments, one where a tired Cliff Booth gets home to his ramshackle trailer and feeds his dog and himself, the other where Rick Dalton gets a crash course method acting lesson from an eight-year-old (Julia Butters).

Tarantino knows what you think about his obsession with feet, so he’s going to shove them in your face. It almost gets parodic at points, with pretty much every female character with a speaking role making a point of drawing attention to their lower appendages for no real reason. Each to their own, but surely a fetish shouldn’t distract from what matters?

The Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) scene (and it is just one scene) didn’t really bother me. I completely understand why it might not have gone down well with audiences but the scene is from Cliff’s POV and it’s Cliff’s skewed view of the world and jealousy of anyone doing well in an industry that doesn’t really want him in it anymore.

The ending is shocking, but not in the way you expect a film with the Manson Family on the periphery to be. Without giving away exactly what happens, think in the same ballpark as what Tarantino did at the end of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. Sharon Tate’s memory isn’t disrespected either; Tarantino is never anything but affectionate, bordering on reverent for her.

Hollywood the place will no doubt love this, because it’s about itself. Tarantino makes it clear in every frame he can that he’s done his research and he’s going to pay tribute to his favourite things from this period. The most entertaining material is how he pastiches the most popular TV shows (Westerns and Procedurals) and films (War and Spaghetti Westerns) of the time.

Much like everything else he’s done over the last decade-and-a-half, Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood is good but not great, with plenty to admire, a killer look and great performances but as a whole is less than the sum of its parts. Maybe I’ll pick up more on a second viewing, but as of now it did not meet the sky-high expectations Tarantino’s supposedly penultimate release had generated. It won’t be in my top 10 of 2019. It might not even be in my top 20. SSP

Well you can’t accuse anybody working on this of just doing the same thing twice. PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING might be even dumber than the first film, which was Guillermo del Toro valiantly attempting to get something with thematic substance out of massive robots hitting massive monsters with cargo ships. Speaking of which, can you believe GDT would prefer to win Oscars than make another one of these? New director Steven S DeKnight throws plenty at the plot, a few unexpected twists and turns, many ideas which only kind-of work and a fair few which don’t work at all, but the film moves at pace and the brightly coloured spectacle is undeniably enjoyable. Cailee Spaeny steals the show from our uninspiring leads John Boyega and Scott Eastwood and Burn Gorman and Charlie Day get a lot more to do this time to mixed success. SSP

I am not a wrestling fan. Childhood friends were and I suppose I must have unconsciously absorbed a few names and special moves, but I still know next-to-nothing about it. And yet I found FIGHTING WITH MY FAMILY, this (mostly) true story rather compelling. It’s got all the classic beats of a sports movie (yes, even a training montage) and many of those expected from a British biopic too, but the honest performances, warmth and life lessons carry it through. You can laugh, you can cheer, you can get pretty darn emotional as you follow Paige and her mad family on their quest for success. Florence Pugh is versatile as always, embodying Paige at her best and worst and strong support is on hand from Nick Frost, Vince Vaughn and Jack Lowden. SSP

I came to the FAST & FURIOUS franchise in time for FAST FIVE, when any pretence about the series being about cars and street racing anymore went up in a bloom of ignited fuel. Since then we’ve had 2 very good and very silly action movies and one less good silly action movie. HOBBS & SHAW is another less good silly action movie, but I can’t say I didn’t get what I came for.

DSS Agent/human tank Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and former baddie mercenary-turned-less-bad mercenary Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) reluctantly team up to secure a deadly engineered virus carried in the blood of Shaw’s estranged sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby). But unstoppable cyborg fanatic Brixton (Idris Elba) is on their tail, an opponent who may be too much of an obstacle even for all three of them, if they ever get along.

Johnson and Statham are a pleasing bickering double-act and both are given memorable reintroductions (Shaw destroys a room full of henchmen with a surprisingly durable champagne bottle and Hobbs does the same to a similar bunch of bad guys with his fists and head). They then trade insults and emasculating put-downs throughout, some of which really push the film’s age classification. David Leitch of DEADPOOL 2 is directing so it isn’t a surprise when the gags fall in the same ballpark (“ball” being the optimum word).

Vanessa Kirby steals the show from the titular heroes without breaking a sweat. As Hattie Shaw she’s easily the most layered character (in that she has some) in the film not to mention proving herself particularly deadly an opponent to anyone standing in her way (the noises some people made in the cinema when you see how much damage she can do just with a fold-up chair…).

There’s no reason for this to be 2 hours+. It’s an A-B chase movie but it chooses to take a really circuitous route to get there. If it had just received a bit of a trim, made more streamlined and pacey it might have been more enjoyable overall. The final act in Hobbs’s homeland of Samoa would have also had much more of an impact if we hadn’t been shown the whole thing in trailers.

The most hilarious thing in the film, intentionally funny or not, is bulletproof super-soldier Idris Elba always putting his motorbike helmet on before a chase scene. I know it would have made the stunt work much simpler to film if you’re not worrying about using doubles, but the amount of times Brixton and his sci-if bike is clearly CGI, you might as well have reinforced his fearless nature.

The CG compositing in general could have used another pass – the stunt work is good, as are individual stunts and effects, but when it goes from one to another it’s jarring on the eyeballs, especially when Idris Elba seems to become a rubbery Mr Fantastic to get his bike around sharp corners. The much-ballyhooed train of off-road vehicles chained to a helicopter going over a cliff must’ve had some practical basis but I really can’t tell where the the effects work takes over from the tactile, so that’s something I suppose.

Hobbs & Shaw is mostly harmless fun that refuses to subscribe to logic or put a check on its stars’ egos or on-screen personas. You probably saw that story the other week about how Johnson and Statham (among other F&F stars who now have producer roles) have an iron grip over how their characters are allowed to appear in this franchise, which makes everything less organic but not any less fun. Just sit back, get comfortable and let the stupid come to you. SSP

The Manga eyes didn’t bother me, it was the mouth, the split-second between changes in facial expression you pick up from a human performer (Rosa Salazar) motion-capturing an almost-human. It’s completely different from creating a believable ape or orc or Gollum. Lead character aside, not a whole lot in ALITA is memorable. Now I’m not saying every character in a Manga or Anime adaptation needs to be Japanese, but at least some of them should be. It looks expensive, the action is flashy and the world is detailed, but you never feel like you’re really in it. Christoph Waltz has to laboriously explain in his admittedly honeyed voice every new concept and conflict, who is what class and why, but too much is left to be continued in writer-producer James Cameron’s arrogant presumption of guaranteed sequels. What we’re left with is a pretty, empty and unfinished story. SSP

To its credit, this Disney remake has some good gags (a circus strongman making a valiant effort to double as their accountant) and a level of visual sumptuousness impressive even by Tim Burton’s usual standards (the costumes, the reimagining of the pink elephants scene). Vexingly, half the cast seem in disagreement over what kind of movie they’re in and the tone is all over the place. After a reasonable and recognisably DUMBO first half, the big-eyed-big-eared elephant’s journey seems to start all over again without the whole route being mapped out properly. Dumbo himself tugs at the heartstrings, but the humans all struggle to make a connection with generally bland performances across the board. I’d never call Michael Keaton’s turn as a villain bland, but I’d struggle to describe it in human terms either, changing accents, energy and poise from one shot to the next. SSP

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About SSP

I'm not paid to write about film - I do it because I love it. Favourites include Bong Joon-ho, Danny Boyle, the Coen Brothers, Nicolas Winding Refn, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Taika Waititi and Edgar Wright. All reviews and articles are original works owned by me. They represent one man's opinion, and I'm more than happy to engage in civilised debate if you disagree.